Interview: The Queers Page 1 of 3 Atlanta DJ's & Bands Z Street Band Orlando DJ's, Bands, & More! Check us out for your Wedding Variety Band in Florida Rock, Party next event. Tunes, Big Band, Swing January 2007 Ads by Google Advertise on this site News Features Sensory Attack Contests Interviews CD Reviews Unsigned Artists The Queers interview by Eric Mitts After talking with Joe King, the founder and sole remaining original remember of old-school punk band The Queers via cell phone as he drove home to New Hampshire for the holidays, Recoil got a good feel of what it would be like on the road with him. Nervously passing cops while talking about the sorry state of punk rock and having long conversations reminiscing what The Ramones really meant to America, the guy is clearly someone who's quick to make friends. Friendship and the music that went along with it has helped King get through some horrendously tough times, including the passing of longtime Queers drummer Hugh O'Neill in 1999. It's obvious that the band still tours in honor of keeping the true punk rock spirit of the 1980s alive for another generation. How music can mean that much to someone and how it can motivate such a long and trying career is simply inspiring. So with the turning of the new year now making The Queers a punk rock cornerstone for a quarter century, and their new label Asian Man reissuing nearly all of their back catalog, as well as their new album, Munki Brain (due out in February), it's time to just let King tell us what he's learned. This year marks The Queers' twenty-fifth, have you found that a lot of your fans have kept with you throughout their life? Or do you get more people who are discovering you for the first time? Joe King: A little bit of both. I'll be honest with you; a lot of our audience has grown up and gotten older. So I noticed the last few years, if and when we do a bar show, which we don't do too often, always whenever we played a bar before it wouldn't go good and now we're starting to get some big, big crowds. We sell out bars when we play [ages] twenty-one plus because a lot of the guys and gals have grown up and they don't want to be around all the stupid kids. But basically it's been all-ages [shows]. I don't want to go and do the Warped Tour and all that bullshit. So that has hurt us as far as visibility, but to me, a lot of the people who go to the Warped Tour, not all of them, but a lot of them, are just into what label the bands are on and it's all promotion. If they say the name, they think the band has to be good. So I choose not to go that route. Yeah, we'd sell more albums if we were on the Warped Tour, but I think most of the bands there suck, a lot of them, and the people, the kids, they're idiots who will buy anything, I think. That affects us at all-ages shows sometimes. We usually do pretty good though. We're lucky because we've been an influence on a lot of bands like My Chemical Romance, Taking Back Sunday, a lot of those bands that got big, they opened up for us. Fall Out Boy, even Billie Joe [Armstrong] from Green Day was on MTV a few months ago and they were talking to him about influences and he said, 'We wouldn't be anywhere without The Queers,' but I think they'd be just fine without us [laughs]. But it was nice of him to mention it. The drummer from Taking Back Sunday showed up in L.A. last time, so we've been able to influence a lot of the bands, so that's cool. We've got a big enough name to go out and tour and not have to do the Warped Tour. So for you, were you mostly influenced by the Beach Boys and pop music like that from the fifties and sixties before you discovered punk? I always liked the late fifties and sixties pop. Stuff like The Turtles, The Beach Boys, Del Shannon, Chuck Berry, The Rolling Stones, The Beatles. I wasn't a Beatles freak, but I certainly liked them. Dick Dale and The Ventures and all that stuff. So the punk thing was just an extension of that to me. The Ramones were just a good Beach Boys sounding band to me, with 'Rockaway Beach' and all that stuff. So I always had that bubblegum mentality, where two minutes of bubblegum music can save the world, and then the punk thing is kind of an extension of that. It all made sense; it all fell into place for me. You've said in other interviews that a lot of punk bands right now don't put The Ramones in their rightful place, which is at the top. Why do you think some younger punk bands or fans are starting to overlook The Ramones' impact and importance? I was talking to Marky [Ramone] about this when we were on tour with him this past summer in Brazil. I think the dumb kids just don't do their homework. To them, punk started with NOFX or The Casualties or Green Day or whoever and they don't go back and find out what influenced all those bands. And I think also a lot of people look at The Ramones and say, 'Oh, they didn't sing about anything smart. They were just singing about sniffing glue and I want to be sedated and I don't care and yeah it was fun, but there wasn't any big message to it.' But I think the thing they overlooked is that The Ramones were the punk message. They taught us to not take yourself too seriously, to be able to laugh at yourself, to question things. That's the punk message in a nutshell right there – very important stuff that I think is overlooked. And you've got to remember also, all the great punk bands back in the day, from bands like The Dickies and The Angry Samoans to The Dead Kennedys and Black Flag Circle Jerks Ramones all that stuff they got their http://recoilmag.com/interviews/?1017 1/4/2007 Interview: The Queers Page 2 of 3 message across, some of them were quite political, but they all used humor as a tool. That was the bottom line, humor. Punk rock was a big take off of aping the big bands like Queen and Yes and Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin and all these overblown, pompous, blowhard rock stars, and that's where punk came from, a lot of it. They were laughing at themselves. And now, I think bands take themselves too seriously. Nobody can laugh at themselves. You're center stage, you look like fucking clowns with purple mohawks and then you're bummed out when someone doesn't take you seriously. I just think the whole humor thing is a really important part of the whole punk scene and it's getting lost in the big business. Money's starting to get thrown around, everybody's starting to take themselves too seriously. I say I don't like Dropkick Murphys. I don't hate them. I'm not into their music. I'm not into the scene where people are violent. When I see stuff like that, I don't think we've learned anything in twenty-five years of punk rock. And I get death threats! Kids will e-mail me going, 'I'll kill you, you mother fucker!' And I'm just going, 'Man, I just don't like the fucking stupid little band that you like. I'm not saying that I want to kill you or that I hate you.' I just don't agree with your politics or whatever. I'm not going to sit around and say that I do. So, it's a weird fucked-up scene when you got bands like Anti-Flag who are just worshipped by so many kids. I think it's so pompous to get onstage and act like you know so much more than the audience and who gives you the fucking right? Like you have a direct line to God and knowledge? That's one thing that really bugs me about punk rock today too. But I grew up on Black Flag and the DKs and The Ramones and those bands made me and that's who I'll always be. So I can't buy a lot of the punk stuff today. People think I'm just a shit talker, but I speak my mind and I speak the truth. You had the chance to co-write a song with Joey Ramone before he died, did you get a chance to talk to him about the importance of humor in punk rock? I wasn't best friends with Joey at all. I knew him certainly well enough so the last couple years of his life he was calling me up. I probably talked to him twenty-five maybe thirty times on the phone, but we only talked about music a little what bands he liked, what he thought of stuff, what I was into, how we loved The Beach Boys.